


Cautionary tales

by SharpestRose



Category: Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-09
Updated: 2013-05-09
Packaged: 2017-12-10 22:21:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/790844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SharpestRose/pseuds/SharpestRose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set post-novels, but with show canon incorporated. Clarice and Hannibal come back to the States.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cautionary tales

When Clarice was still an agent-in-training, there were two cautionary tales among the lessons. 

No, not tales. Nothing so complex as that. More like body parts, as disconnected from the whole as cropped-off shots in advertising or porn. No context offered, just the whispered gossipy warnings of _Miriam Lass's arm_ and, later, _Will Graham's face_.

Sometimes she wonders if she, too, has become a cautionary piece. _Clarice Starling's heart_ , maybe. Or _Clarice Starling's soul_. Probably not. Her teeth, maybe. Her mouth. 

Hannibal is reading _Lolita_ again on the plane ride to the States. Sometimes he reads a phrase or sentence out to her, remarking appreciatively on the way Nabokov made English into poetry.

"We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries," he reads aloud to her now. 

"Like our horses," Clarice responds. She remembers how disappointed Hannibal had seemed by the happy-enough ending, all those years ago, when she'd told him the story of waking to the sound of the lambs screaming, of making her escape on an old horse bound for the glue factory. She still can't read Orwell's _Animal Farm_ and appreciate the allegory as she'd like. It cuts too close to the bone. But her escape had bought her trusty steed a second life. Spared it from the future it had seemed doomed to die in.

Both she and Hannibal spent part of their childhoods in orphanages, waking in the dark to nightmares of remembered screams. And each of them had, in the stables of those orphanages, been able to spend time with a horse who had come with them from their former lives. 

Strange affinities.

Clarice has never met Will Graham, though that fact will change soon enough. She has heard a lot about him, and he has doubtlessly done the same about her. She hopes that her own hatred of tabloid gossip is matched in him, and suspects it is. His past with tattlecrime.com is perhaps even darker than hers. 

_Okay then. Forget what you think you know,_ she tells herself. People called his scars horrific, disfiguring, well so what. You couldn't love a person for their face -- faces change. She knows as well as anyone ever has how easily a face can become nothing, can become meat, can become just memory. She's seen it often enough in her life. At least Will Graham's still around.

As to his 'gift', who even knew how much of that remained now. The last concrete gossip she'd heard about the man had been years and years ago, and he was already a lonely drunk selling boat engine parts in some backwater then. There might be nothing much left of the strange, brilliant mind she's heard so many things about.

She doubts that, though. Hannibal has kept up his occasional letter-writing to the man, a correspondence as persistent and sustained and one-sided as her own long-distance conversation from him had been. If Hannibal had known about her own fall from grace almost as soon as it had begun, then he would have ways of discovering at least that much about Will Graham as well. Where he is, what he's doing. Who he has become. 

Clarice wonders what those letters say. She never attempts to sneak a look. It's nothing to do with her. She's never even met him. She does wonder, though. 

But all of that's in the past now, or will be. They'll be back in the States soon enough, back where their faces -- their old faces, anyway; faces change so easily -- and fingerprints are flagged with red-alerts in every database. A dangerous adventure, but that's nothing new for either of them.

"I think it's finally time to go see how good Will is doing," Hannibal had said decisively, and so here they are. 

She wonders what strange affinities are there between all three of them, waiting to be discovered as they learn each other. 

"So many people think it's a love story, don't they?" she says to Hannibal now, nodding in the direction of the book in his hands. "I used to hear that all the time from people, before I read it for myself. They'd say it was a love story, when really it's a horror story. I was shocked anyone could think otherwise. They're prey and predator, not lovers."

"Indeed," Hannibal agrees, his eyes distant for a moment as he turns over some thought in his head. Then his gaze returns to the present once again and he offers a small smile. "An easy confusion of genres to make, I suppose. It'll be interesting to see which one we're in, by the time it plays through to the conclusion, won't it?" 


End file.
